Tusitala i jego polski czytelnik

Author(s): Carlo Ginzburg / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2015

This text by Carlo Ginzburg analyses the complicated fate of the leitmotif of Robert L. Stevenson’s ‘The Bottle Imp’. It enabled Italian historian to discover astonishing links between fiction, reality, and scientific cognition, and to formulate a daring theory claiming that Bronisław Malinowski would have not formulated his most famous scientific thesis if he had not earlier read Stevenson’s story. In other words, the expedition to the Triobriand Islands would have not been realised in the cognitive sense were it not for the knowledge provided by literary fiction.

Osiadły podróżnik. Topografia fikcji

Author(s): Arkadiusz Żychliński / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2015

The article proposes a general typology of narrativised journeys so as to deal in greater detail with a selected sub-category of literary fiction, in which the journey is a backdrop extracting the metaphorical potential of the voyage. The processes of adopting fiction and overcoming space share a curiosity of experience and are seemingly divided by the course of achieving it. An analysis of three model-like examples of meta-fictional anthropofiction (by Franz Kafka, Antonio Tabucchi, and Roberto Bolaño) makes it possible to consider arguments both confirming the correctness of such an identification and doubting it, and subsequently to devise a conceptual framework allowing a more general interpretation of the universal category of the truth of experience.

O podróży w świat literatury

Author(s): Krzysztof Łukaszewicz / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2015

War das Dichten will verstehen, /Muß ins Land der Dichtung gehen, /Wer den Dichter will verstehen, /Muß in Dichters Lande gehen – this is the motto of a number of remarks formulated by Johann W. Goethe to guarantee a better understanding of his collection of poems: The West-Eastern Divan.An analysis of the contexts whose impact gave rise to the motto, and a pursuit of questions whose posing it provoked, lead to such issues as pictorial qualities, Orientalism, world literature, and translation. Goethe the poet, the prose writer, and the scholar argued that a skilful and creative use of linguistic means opens up towards oneself and the world, while a voyage to the world of literature is tantamount to a voyage across the world.

Realne fikcje. Iść za tekstem

Author(s): Dariusz Czaja / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2015

Reading is a very mysterious and complexed process. It’s a very creative act and of cognitive value, as well. No one knows what really happens in our minds while reading. Following the literary text can be compared to a specific journey. Theme of the Traitor and Heroby Jorge Luis Borges is a departing point of the presented text. Then, the author switches to The Spider’s Stratagemby Bernardo Bertolucci, the film, which is based on Borges’ short novel. And the final stage of this imaginary/real journey is Sabbioneta, very small lombardian city, in fact: la citta ideale,built in XVI century by Vespasiano Gonzaga. In this moment palimpsest-like narration of the article is fully completed.

Bruce Chatwin na ścieżkach pieśni stworzenia

Author(s): Rafał Nahirny / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2015

The author of this article analysed the manner in which Bruce Chatwin constructed the landscape of Central Australia in his The Songlines. With this objective in mind he described the process of humanisation characteristic for the Australian interior and took a closer look at the obstacles encountered by the English traveller attempting to understand Australian dreaming tracks. The author claims that the unexpected and authentic meeting between Bruce, the lead protagonist of The Songlines, and the indigenous Aborigines took place at the precise moment when the former abandoned his cognitive ambitions. Consequently, Chatwin’s book delineates a specific literary trail, which postulates veering from the previously chosen path for the sake of ”wandering”.

„Przyszedłem tu jako obcy, odchodzę stąd jako obcy”. Muzyczne wędrówki w „niepełną nieskończoność”

Author(s): Anna Chęćka-Gotkowicz / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2015

As a universal way of thinking music holds promise of coming closer to inexpressible experiences. That, which cannot be captured via conceptions reveals itself to the performer (and the listener) in solitary existence amidst sounds. Upon occasions, the existential journey into the self - as long as it is granted a social signature thanks to artistic means of expression - changes into poignant interpretation, which expands the field of comprehending not only music but also existence as such. This is the sort of reflection that the listener is invited to pursue by the music of Schubert, marked with the idiom of a journey of despair. In the presented text this trail was followed by such interpreters of Schubert’s works as the essayist Pascal Quignard, the musicologist Charles Fisk, the poet Stanisław Barańczak, and the pianist Sviatoslav Richter. By listening closely to Schubert and by following in his steps they reconstructed the composer’s wanderings and opened up new horizons for the meaning encoded in his music.

Błędne mapy

Author(s): Magdalena Barbaruk / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2015

The point of departure for the reflections pursued by the author of this article on the uniqueness of literary routes is a documentary film – Errant Maps (screenplay by Magdalena Barbaruk, directed by Szymon Uliasz, 2014) made by following the trails of Don Quixote. The film provides material for presenting the visualness of the tracks, both as regards the selection of tools that ought to be applied for examining and depicting such trails as well as issues of fundamental significance, associated with the necessity of being in places and participating in literary landscapes. With this purpose in mind the author recalled the conception of the “construction of the place” formulated by Ignatius of Loyola (Spiritual Exercises). The analysis focuses successively on the most essential visual forms of literary routes: photography, the cinema, and maps. The article ends with deliberations about wandering/erring, which the author believes are a metaphor of following a literary trail and which in the text obtained an axiological qualification. The literary route as such is defined as the reader’s way of life moulded by assorted values connected with the literary work, whose scenery is a landscape conceived as one of the symptoms of culture.

Podróż jako opowieść: o przejściach między tekstem a krajobrazem

Author(s): Zoriana Rybczyńska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2015

The author tries to look more closely at the way the lecture Agnon’s novel Guest for one night and translate into the spatial practices. In addition, she based on the text of the novel reconstructs the imaginary topography Buchach (in the form of narrative maps) that is deeply entwined with sensory codes of forming a separate level of experience space and creating cultural landscape. These factors are important in the design of the possible tour routes (Agnon routes), and also to establish the general Buchach imagology.

Arles

Author(s): Adam Wodnicki / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2015

A personal postscript to the Provençal series: Tryptyk oksytański (Notatki z Prowansji, Obrazki z krainy d’Oc, Arelate. Obrazki z niemiejsca), containing the author’s self-reflection about the simultaneously functional and real nature of the world described by him.

Topo-Grafia w ruchu. Sztuka chodzenia Mirona Białoszewskiego

Author(s): Agnieszka Karpowicz / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2015

This text proposes an analysis of the art of walking conceived in the prose of Miron Białoszewski as a carrier of literary meanings. By extracting the functions of walking as a cultural activity A. Karpowicz embarked upon a reconstruction of the conception of space and the methods of becoming acquainted with it in Białoszewski’s oeuvre. In doing so, he came across their concurrence with anthropological conceptions of space and methods of studying urban space, focused on the practices of walking (the anthropology of daily life according to Roch Sulima, the visual ethnography of Sarah Pink, and the integral and creativity-oriented approach represented by Tim Ingold). This interpretation made it possible to indicate the superior importance of the practice of walking – the creation of a continuum - in writings by Białoszewski.

Marszruta wierszy zapiski z wędrówek trasą 'Poematu o mieście Lublinie'

Author(s): Paweł Próchniak / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2015

Poemat o mieście Lublinie, written by Józef Czechowicz in 1934, is musical score of sorts. Its realisations (a radio programme conceived by the poet, successive strata of interpreting Poemat ... as a literary text, actual expeditions across Lublin along the route described in the poem) provide each other with various options of reading the text and associated registers of meanings; in doing so they expand and render nuanced the complex (semantic, imaginary, existential) inner potential of the poem, which is a certain form of memory (Czechowicz used the term: ”recollection”) and which inserts memory-recollection into the town’s topography. This gesture performed by the poet and the permeation of an imaginary trail and an actual itinerary are the object of the reflections pursued by the author of this essay, which is another sort of wandering involving the imagination, thoughts, and writing.

Kod Fernanda Pessoi. Traktat lizboński, czyli czego turysta w Lizbonie nigdy nie zobaczy?

Author(s): Krystian Darmach / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2015

Pessoa and Lisbon. A manual. An odyssey of the imagination. Information indispensable for getting to know Lisbon and superfluous for experiencing it. Is it possible to rid experience of all sorts of literary borrowings, not to mention cultural ones? What would be the effects, gains, and losses of such a striving? The author attempted to answer these questions by delineating a map of the territory of impacts on the way, and involving himself, Lisbon, and Pessoa. By following the traces of our encounters, evasions, permeations and dependencies. By cultivating a t(r)op(e)ography of assorted dimensions of joint presence/absence, and by indirectly taking into account the rarely discussed Pessoa guidebook to Lisbon.

Wędrówki po mieście podziemnym – powieściowe uniwersum. Metro i antropologia metra jako inspiracje flânerie

Author(s): Blanka Brzozowska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2015

A presentation of an extraordinary image of a town that emerged in the course of flâneur explorations of subterranean metro tunnels. The point of departure for these reflections is the anthropology of the metro proposed by the French scholar Marc Augé, whose work is situated along the borderline of anthropology and literature and portrays the metro as a fascinating field of research for the anthropologist and, at the same time, as a “memory machine” blending collective History and the individual histories of daily travellers (including the researcher). In turn, literary inspirations, exemplified by a series of books inaugurated by Metro 2033, a novel by Dmitry Glukhovsky, provoke readers-flâneurs to embark upon sometimes hazardous journeys into the underground recesses of a city in a search for mysteries created by a tangle of historical facts, rumours, urban legends, and the imagination of the town dwellers.

Czas podróży korzennych

Author(s): Walentyna Krupowies / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2015

The author focuses on the ways in which Vilnius is remembered and reconstructed by some of the most prominent Polish writers raised in that place, i.e. in the poems of Czesław Miłosz. The image of the city, remembered as an idyllic space of childhood, undergoes various metamorphoses – it is transformed by memory and nostalgia, and confronted with reality only after several decades. In her text Walentyna Krupowies analyses the complex work of memory and oblivion in the process of shaping of the literary image of the place and carefully re-reads some of the classic texts of Polish literature of the past century.

Wędrowni handlarze. Jak jeździliśmy za granicę

Author(s): Paweł Sowiński / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2015

A presentation of the culture of the distribution of goods in People’s Poland and a synthetic interpretation of itinerant trade from an historical perspective. The article, situated within the current of trans-frontier and trans-cultural studies, indicates both grassroots factors and the institutional context. Heretofore research dealing with post-war Europe firmly emphasised the significance of the division of the Continent into two isolated parts. Without completely negating this thesis, the author pointed to a systematic permeation of ideas and culture across the Iron Curtain and pondered the course of this expansion of the Western world in the conditions of a peripheral country and the political hegemony of communism.

A Wisła dalej płynie. Opisać życie

Author(s): Petro Murianka / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2015

The published fragment comes from a volume of childhood reminiscences: A Wisła dalej płynie.

Gap betlejemski, nazareński, jerozolimski, jerychoński i mikstacki

Author(s): Marian Pilot / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2015

A pilgrimage? I am quite willing to go on a pilgrimage to Mikstat for the feast day of St. Roch (16 August). Pious women, however, urge me: forget St. Roch! A proper pilgrimage is the one to the Holy Land, along the trails of the Lord Jesus, and under the guidance of the Pallottine Fathers! I have my doubts and hesitate. I might like to set off for the Holy Land and walk in the footsteps of the Lord Jesus, but shall l I be able to to do so, will the task not surpass me? Have I earned such a privilege? Has my life been sufficiently exemplary?

Pierwsze pokolenie polskich freudystów – próba geopsychoanalizy

Author(s): Lena Magnone / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2015

Doctor Krokowski from The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann as well as other examples from inter-war European literature demonstrate that the psychoanalyst in the group consciousness of the period was a Polish Jew. The distinct connection between psychoanalysis and Polishness was the outcome of a considerable representation of persons of Polish origin among the pioneers of the movement: Poles were among the closest collaborators of Freud and in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society they comprised the second largest group after the Austrians. They also included numerous courageous women who frequently combined psychoanalytical practice with radical socialism and decidedly feminist views. The author of the article outlined a sui generis group biography of this generation of cosmopolitan intellectuals, lay Jews born in Galicia, Poles educated and working in Vienna or Berlin, believing in the cultural and political force of the Freudian project and dramatically aware of the need to change the world or at the very least its sexual and social codes. In this fashion the author showed the way in which the outbreak of the Second Word War affected the fate of the protagonists of the text, condemning them, at the height of their careers, to emigration and starting life anew in entirely different conditions; he also proved that the year 1939 denoted the end of the emancipatory dimension of classical psychoanalysis, which from a Central European cultural project turned into an American theory. The personal successes of the Europeans in their new homeland and the ostensible triumph of psychoanalysis in America conceal its actual end: psychoanalysis assumed medical dimensions and became deprived of feminist and radical features. The resignation by the emigrants of the core of Freudism – a condition for finding employment in the United States – also obliterated its Central European roots. The presented attempt at geo-psychoanalysis entails predominantly following the trajectory of the Polish members of this movement, who at the onset of the twentieth century arrived from the provinces of the Empire to its Viennese capital, and who as a result of World War II once again found themselves on the sidelines, in a psychoanalytical “Wild West”, which in the course of the following decades turned, with their cooperation, into a new centre of the world, thus relegating the former one to the role of a periphery.

Pod lukrem

Author(s): Julia Guadagnin,Ludwik Stomma / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2015

Zapiski. 1981 II

Author(s): Henryk Bereza / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2015